Mechanical shufflers have been known for over 100 years. Some mechanical shufflers in recent years have had a capability of dispensing two or more cards together as a hand for each of several players including the dealer.
Card games played in casinos utilize one or more decks of cards, with each deck usually consisting of 52 cards. For certain games specialized decks of fewer cards or decks including one or two jokers in addition to the normal 52 are used.
New decks of cards are normally delivered to a gaming table in a sequential arrangement in order of suit and rank, but the cards must be shuffled before beginning play so that they are in a random arrangement unknown to any of the players.
Various mechanisms have been designed for placing cards from a deck into a different, shuffled, order for use in play, sometimes by using a random number generator to define a random order of cards in a “shuffled” deck and then using a computer controlled mechanism to identify each card in a deck being shuffled and to place each card in its designated space.
Casinos prefer to use mechanical shufflers instead of having dealers manually shuffle the cards for several reasons: a major reason is to save time otherwise spent on shuffling, since the earnings of a casino depend upon the number of hands that can be played during a gaming session. Another reason is to be able to avoid or detect cheating. Partly for that reason it is also desirable to be able to review the order in which cards have been dealt, and some available mechanical shufflers have the capacity to determine the order of cards and retain it in a computer memory. Known mechanical shufflers, however, have suffered from several shortcomings, such as simply being slower than desired, or being so large that they impede a supervisor's view of the game table or players' hands, or impede a casino security system surveillance camera's field of view. Other mechanical shufflers frequently jam and thus fail to provide a shuffled deck ready for use in play without a delay while the shuffler is cleared and a complete deck is then shuffled. Casinos frequently replace the decks of cards in play, but nervous or careless players may bend cards, or spill drinks, making cards likely to stick together, leading to some shuffler jamming.
What is desired, then, is an easily operated, dependable, and efficient shuffler able to handle playing cards that have been bent or that tend to stick to one another, and that is small enough not to require a specially built table or complex installation of the shuffler for it to be reliably usable in a casino situation, and a shuffler able to present shuffled cards either as a complete shuffled deck or as hands of a desired number of cards for each player or the dealer.